


fools in love

by cydonic



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F, Female Bucky Barnes, Female Steve Rogers, Recovery, Rule 63, fem!Steve/fem!Bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 08:41:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19460419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cydonic/pseuds/cydonic
Summary: She feels her stomach swoop. It’s been doing that more lately, too. For someone so heavily weighed down with metal, you would think that it would be impossible for her to feel like she’s flying.





	fools in love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [princessoftheworlds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessoftheworlds/gifts).



> Here is my second contribution to the Captain America Reverse Big Bang! Thank you to the artist, princessoftheworlds, for creating this - I'm a big sucker for fem!Steve/fem!Bucky so this was delightful. Thank you again to all of the people who made this event happen - it was a great time! Special thanks to Moony for being my beta at such short notice, the feedback was appreciated (though I wish I'd had the energy to add more to their end scene - maybe another time!)
> 
> I wish I could say this one came as easily as my first, but I struggled a lot. Hopefully it conveys the tone I was going for, which is something soft and kind and exactly what Bucky deserves in every universe.

It had started out like this:

_“Did we ever…?”_

_“I feel like maybe…?”_

_“Was there a time when…?”_

For months, those were the only words she could drag up as a prelude to the memories that came to her thick and fast, like she didn’t deserve the right to the real story, like she couldn’t trust her own mind.

But every single time, Stevie had lit up like the rising sun and nodded her head – sometimes she added supporting details, the parts her broken brain had missed, and at others she merely reminisced in pleased silence.

She spent so long barely claiming her name – responding only by the way Stevie’s voice ticked up affectionately, the way cats came to understand their moniker. She’d been too embarrassed to admit that it didn’t fit – _Bucky_ , like an ungainly thing coming out of Stevie’s mouth. She’d been too embarrassed because _Stevie_ had liked it, and that was all that mattered in her world at the time. Stevie, she thinks, has always been a part of her world in such a way that Bucky had felt powerless - a willing victim to the force of her current.

\---

_The blonde marches up to her, evidently on a mission of national importance, blood dripping down her pale, freckled chin. When she arrives, her eyes scream a challenge – narrowed in, as if they’re ready for ten more rounds despite the mess of her face. After a critical once-over that leaves her feeling more naked than she ever has before in her life, the girl thrusts out a hand and smirks, teeth bloody between split, red lips._

_“You’re welcome,” the girl states simply, and she looks between the blood on her teeth – on her knuckles – and back at her grin._

\---

“What did you do?” She asks, quietly, staring at the piece of paper in her hands.

They want her to try journaling; Stevie bought her this lovely notebook and a pen that glides smooth over the crisp paper, and she curls up in the corner of their couch to write down her thoughts. Today had started with, ‘ _I don’t like my name_ ’ and now she’s at a loss.

The writing did this, bought back memories quicker than anything else.

It tells her that she _liked_ writing – images of herself, in a time long-forgotten, laying down on her stomach, cursive writing flowing from her fingers like magic.

It teaches her that watching Stevie has always been a hobby of hers, the parallel drawn between now and then: blonde in both, hair catching fire in the late afternoon sun, paint smudged fingers and cheeks, a private smile.

“What did I do?” Stevie asks, slowly, as she turns around – she always looks guilty, even now as she’s done nothing wrong.

Sometimes it feels immensely stupid to ask, like she should know the answer. She bites the end of the pen, worrying it between her teeth until Stevie pries, “Buck?” but she isn’t listening.

\---

_She doesn’t know what she’s done that she should be thanking this girl for, but she extends her hand nevertheless – her Ma’d never raised her to have poor manners, after all – and shakes._

_Only once her hand has been relinquished, does she stop to ask, “why am I thankful?”_

_The blonde jerks a thumb over her shoulder, too careless to turn and look. “Some assholes were making fun of your name,” and that makes sense, because what parents name their little girl_ James _of all things. It was a sort of fond teasing she’d endured for years, fond only because the boys plead to their teacher, say they were_ just friends _, it’s just a_ joke.

\---

“Oh,” she mumbles around the cold metal casing of the pen, the memory developing in real-time, an overlap to her reality.

\---

_“Oh,” she says, taken off-guard, and then she smiles – pearly white. “Thanks.”_

_The blonde winks and smears blood across her chin with the back of her hand, making to clean up. Ma’d kill her if she came home looking like that, spatters of red staining her school clothes._

_With that, the girl disappears into the street, walking with a spring in her step that could well have been a limp for all she knows._

_And that was the first time she ever laid eyes on Stephanie Grace Rogers._

\---

“Buck?”

Stevie’s closer now, kneeling on the floor by the couch. Her hands are at a respectful distance; she watches as they clench, eager to soothe or fight the hurt away. When she blinks, they still look bloody – the paint smears on her face, too, flashes red in the darkness.

“Could you,” she starts, swallowing around the dread that creeps up whenever she has the nerve to ask for something, “call me – something else?”

Worse than the bile in her throat is the crestfallen look on Stevie’s face. She’s so good now, so quick to smooth it away, but her face has always been an open book. It’s understandable: she’s not Bucky, not exactly, and it must be hard to separate the expectation from reality.

“Of course,” Stevie says, with so much sincerity it hurts. “I could call you – Well, some of the girls we went to school with called you Jamie, I could try that? Or something else, whatever you want. You never really wanted me to call you James, but…”

Her eyes flutter back to the page. Part of her remembers the revulsion: _it’s a boy’s name,_ she’d protested to her parents. But then she writes _James_ in looping script, just to try it out, and the rest of her name comes naturally afterwards, the _Rebecca Barnes_ joining it on muscle memory alone.

“I like James,” she says, with a small, unfamiliar smile at her name.

As a child she might have rankled at her chosen name, _James_ , but now she thinks she might like it. Perhaps that’s why she likes it. No one ever called her James. She was never _really_ James, so this was a fresh start in its own way, the clean slate of her birth name. James wasn’t thrust upon her, the way Stevie had said, _“Bucky?”_ like it meant anything (it had, that was the _point_ , how selfish –

\---

_She can fight._

_She knows that as well as she knows anything about herself; which is to say, she knows it intrinsically but on a day-to-day basis, it ebbs and flows like the tide. Her mind is not her friend on many days._

_She can fight, and she could win, at least for a certain amount of time._

_But things were easier when she didn’t fight. Their hands are not gentle, gentle isn’t the right word, but they aren’t as cruel when she is compliant. She doesn’t often remember what happens – doesn’t know why she flinches when she hears someone’s phone ring, or why she vomits when she smells a certain cologne – but her body remembers, and her body remembers that it is bad._

_“The woman,” she begins, slowly, words coming together like clouds – drifting, uncertain, barely-formed things even as they slip past her lips, “on the bridge. Who was she?” She’d called her something. She’d called her Bucky. It felt like it was important._

_She doesn’t realise until too late that, in their minds, the words are a retaliation._

_Unthinkingly she bites down on the mouthguard, the pain inevitable –_

\---

“James?” Stevie’s voice cut through the sound of her own scream torn from her body, and James twitchs – blinks, and then she’s back.

A breath shakes itself free of her lungs. Stevie’s hands are close to tearing the stuffing out of the couch cushions. The smile she dredges up is shaky but sincere, and James carefully lays her flesh hand atop one of Stevie’s.

“Thank you.”

\---

Slowly, the memories start to feel like they belong to her. Like James owns them; good, bad, mediocre – whatever category they fall into. They are hers to collect and keep safe, like a dragon hoarding treasures. Instead of asking permission, James starts to speak as if things are fact until corrected – and she is rarely, if ever, corrected.

Because _her mind_ is correct.

Her mind _knows_.

The problem, James discovers, with this tentative, newfound ability to trust (her mind, the pleasure of writing, _Stevie_ ), is that her mind is digging deeper. As if it wants to test the boundaries of her faith in it (the same way James is sometimes bold and sees how far she can push Stevie before giving up, backing off, tearing herself apart with guilt), it brings up less and less believable images.

Now that it’s a habit, the pair of them sit in the living room, where the windows are floor-to-ceiling and face west, and they catch the afternoon sun. They work together. James doesn’t journal all the time. Sometimes she writes, mostly nonsensical ficlets which could well be journal entries for all she doesn’t remember. Stevie doesn’t paint all the time. What they do, without fail, is something separate together. Sometimes Stevie puts music on and sings, and sometimes James just listens to the sound of her mumbling under her breath as she scowls at the image forming on the canvas.

At present she isn’t writing much of anything, instead doodling on the page; small swirls that she eventually adds tiny petals and leaves to, a vine slowly crawling across the top of her page.

\---

_It’s cold outside. James doesn’t want to go out, but she has a date waiting and it’s the easiest way to keep the suspicions off them. Stevie is sulking the way she always does, the pout so pretty on her lips in the reflection of the mirror that James stops applying her red lipstick and turns to kiss the look from her face._

_Stevie attempts to maintain her grouchy mood, but she laughs and then James kisses her parted lips, slides her tongue inside and –_

\---

It’s brief enough that Stevie doesn’t notice her drifting out of time for a moment.

James uncurls from her spot on the lounge and places her book, closed, on the coffee table. This, she has been trying more of, too’ approaching Stevie, bridging the gap between their bodies the way she _knows_ they used to. She reaches a searching hand out – the flesh one – and gently taps the back of Stevie’s hand where it’s holding onto her paintbrush.

Stevie beams at her

\---

– _when they break apart, at last, Stevie’s grinning: big and wide, mouth smeared with red lipstick –_

\---

and James feels her stomach swoop. It’s been doing that more lately, too. For someone so heavily weighed down with metal, you would think that it would be impossible for her to feel like she’s flying.

“I want to go shopping,” James explains in a soft voice, hesitant to break the sanctity of their afternoons together. Biting her lip, she lifts her hand from Stevie’s and gently pushes back a strand of blonde that’s fallen into her face.

Stevie exhales a few seconds later, once James’ hands are at a safe distance. “Right now?”

“If that’s okay.”

“Sure,” Stevie says, still smiling bright, as she starts to tidy up the paints she’s been working with.

James shifts her weight to one leg, watching Stevie’s fingers work. She’s been practising her touch with Stevie, and each has left her yearning for more. “We could take your bike?” She extends as an offer, knowing that Stevie’s had two helmets waiting for them since – well, since she _got_ the bike.

Stevie pauses and looks up. “You’d want to do that?” There’s something like awe in her voice, and James wonders at how someone like _her_ could make someone like _Stevie_ sound that way. It should be illegal.

James swallows down the lump in her throat (she’d be so close, she wouldn’t be able to step back if it all got too much, she’d be pushing her fledgling ability to trust to the absolute limit) and nods her head in favour of opening her mouth – at which point she’d undoubtedly rescind the offer.

\---

She’s glad she doesn’t open her mouth, because when Stevie guides her hands around her waist James feels at home. Stevie treats both metal and flesh the same, placing them where she wants them and tapping each once on the back when she’s done.

James turns her helmeted head so she can almost rest her cheek on Stevie’s shoulder and watch the world travel past them. If she stops to think too hard about how Stevie cuts through the traffic she’ll drive herself to panic, but she’s not thinking about anything other than Stevie’s body on hers.

\---

 _The walls are whisper-thin and the neighbours are yelling. They’ve had this argument before, James knows that – she is instead curled around Stevie’s body, pressing kisses down the notches of her spine. Stevie giggles and writhes in James’ grip, gasping out, “_ Bucky _,” when one of her hands wanders beneath her hitched-up nightgown._

_“Stevie,” James purrs as she slides lower down the bed, kicking the sheets out of the way as she goes. “My baby,” she adds, reverential, as she rolls Stevie onto her back and settles between her legs, leaving kisses up the soft, pale skin of her inner thigh. Beneath the near-translucent skin, James can trace the blue-green veins that keep Stevie alive. She does so with kindness, thanking them for their service._

_Stevie growls out, “c’mon, Buck,_ please _,” as James continues to taunt her. There are yellowing remains of her teeth marks from near-healed bruises. This terrain is unfamiliar to all except the two of them - James, the one to chart it with teeth and tongue._

_She isn’t the sort to make Stevie suffer unnecessarily, though, and so her mouth nears the heat at the apex of her thighs. James’ nose brushes against tight, blonde curls as her tongue darts out. She applies the gentlest of pressure, but Stevie’s wound tighter than usual. Those beautiful, creamy thighs clamp around James’ head and she takes the very obvious hint in that gesture._

\---

“We’re here.”

The bike is tilted to the side, Stevie’s booted foot on the ground.James’ hands twitch under Stevie’s, and she moves them away, apologetic. They have to get off the bike at some point, or else James would’ve insisted she put her hands right back there and keep holding on.

Instead, James dismounts and stands a little unsteadily on the sidewalk for a moment. She thinks she’s ridden motorbikes before, on her own, but the only memory running through her mind at the moment is Steve’s body laid out in front of her, glowing in the moonlight, and – well.

It’s a bit distracting.

Stevie joins her on the sidewalk soon after, and James doesn’t realise she has the helmet on still until Stevie is standing in front of her and holding her hands in front of her chin. Asking permission. James, mind a skipping record stuck on her face and Stevie’s soft, kiss-covered thighs, nods a bit too enthusiastically.

There’s a brush of Stevie’s skin on James’, then the helmet is lifting off her head and being placed into one of the panniers on the bike.

“Ready?” Stevie asks, as if she’s done it a million times before, and James steps up and carefully winds their fingers together. “You know what you’re looking for?”

James considers telling Stevie, then just shakes her head instead. Her hair feels sweaty where it’s been under the helmet, and she uses the glove-clad prosthetic to try and inspire some body back into it.

“Helmet hair,” Stevie snickers, teasingly, as she leads James into the mall.

\---

The people should bother her – it’s not busy by any means, however there are still unknown variables in the environment – but it doesn’t. All James does is hold onto Stevie’s hand and wander. They stop and look everywhere, lifting clothes hangers up and holding them out to one another: sometimes jokingly, with horrible frilly dresses in disgusting patterns; at other times, it’s meant as a compliment, the right colour or cut to flatter their body.

James can’t afford to seem too focused on one thing, but she lets herself slow when they walk past a make-up store. Stevie, who is not the most observant of people, doesn’t notice until their joined hands tug at one another.

“Do you want to go in?” Stevie asks, as she has for each store before.

James nods, and stops playing coy. She makes a beeline for a row of lipsticks she’d seen from the outside.

The row, which was quite an inaccurate way to describe an entire _wall_ , is packed to the brim with lip colours of every shade. _Every_ shade. James stares reverently at all of them. She traces her fingers along the colour swatches beneath each, ranging from nude to a deep, berry red – white to black to green to blue on a separate shelf, the colours so strange and unique that she can’t help but stare.

“Can I help you ladies with anything today?” A woman asks, and James startles.

Stevie’s beaten her to it. “No, thank you, ma’am.” She’s still holding James’ hand, patient and kind.

Once she’s had her fill of staring at the unusual colours, she returns to the lines of red. Back when she bought lipstick, there were only a couple of shades to choose from. Now, there are enough that she could likely wear a new red each day for a month and still have some leftover.

“You used to wear lipstick all the time,” Stevie remarks, in the off-handed way she brings up unspoken memories now. James wonders if she, too, remembers the way it looked smudged against the private, pale skin of her upper-thigh.

“I remember,” James says, hand hovering above several lipsticks indecisively.

Further down the aisle there are several girls swatching the lipsticks on their wrists, turning their arms into colourfully striped canvases. They twist them this way and that under the fluorescent store lighting. Some of them even sparkle.

“Could you help me pick a colour?” James asks, almost timidly, as her eyes enviously move away from the teenage girls.

Stevie squeezes her hand and, for once, James is thankful for her straightforward approach. Stevie selects one in black packaging. The box says it’s called _Ruby Woo_ , but that doesn’t mean anything until the cashier starts talking as if it saved his life.

“It just works for everyone, doesn’t it? The _ultimate_ shade.” He says, nearly swooning.

James smiles and nods politely as Stevie pays for it.

\---

The lipstick is the only thing they buy, and once they get home James disappears into the bathroom to apply it. She doesn’t tell Stevie that’s what she’s doing, nor does Stevie ask, but she’s sure she knows.

Carefully – this is _Ruby Woo_ , after all – James unpackages the lipstick. She turns it over in her hands. She removes the lid and winds it up, just a fraction. The surface is unblemished and perfect, and she remembers but she doesn’t disappear into it the way she normally does. Instead, James leans in close to the mirror and starts to draw.

She begins with her bottom lip, running the velvety red across its surface. That one is easy. It’s when she approaches the curve of her top lip that she runs into some trouble, overdrawing one side and leaving the Cupid’s bow crowded and lopsided. James attempts to even up the other side, the lipstick starts to gather in the corner of her lips and when she tries to swipe it away it smears outward and –

It’s a disaster.

James’ hands shake as she returns the lid to the lipstick, barely restraining herself from throwing it across the room. It was expensive. Stevie bought it _for her_.

And she can’t even be the woman she used to be for her. She can’t be Bucky, not ever, but she can’t even be a halfway decent imitation.

It doesn’t occur to James that she’s been in the bathroom too long because Stevie knocks tentatively on the door, calls, “Are you alright?” through the wood.

“Yes,” James answers, but her voice breaks because she’s still staring at her _fucking mouth_.

Stevie’s feet shuffle. “Can I come in?”

For so many months, James has tried to avoid letting Stevie in. She doesn’t want her to see this vulnerability, this visceral _proof_ that James is not who Stevie once loved, can never be. But all she wants, at that moment in time, is to be with Stevie. She wants to wrap herself up in Stevie, delight in the size of her and the way that she can be fully enveloped within the warm safety of her body.

So instead of refusing, as instinct demands, she repeats, “Yes,” in a smaller voice and waits.

Not that she’s left waiting long. Stevie almost instantly opens the door and slides in, closing it behind her because she knows how James gets when there are open doors and rooms she can’t fully surveil.

“Hey,” Stevie starts off, stepping in close enough that James could touch her without having to completely extend her arm, “what’s wrong?”

James doesn’t know how to put it into words. It feels stupid. She can’t go back to being the person she was once, and yet it’s the only thing she wants. She wants to hear _Bucky_ and feel like it’s calling to her, she wants to know that Stevie isn’t holding herself back for James’ sake, she wants to _be_ the person Stevie fell in love with because Stevie hasn’t changed, not at all. James fell right back in love with her, easy as breathing.

James instead laughs bitterly, looking at the ground. “I didn’t do a very good job,” she explains, waving one hand at her face to indicate her failure.

“Can I?” Stevie asks, stepping in, gesturing with her hand in James’ lowered line of sight.

She nods, and then Stevie’s gentle hands are on her chin, tilting her head up.

“Don’t be silly,” Stevie says, after an assessing look. She uses the fingers of her other hand to carefully tidy up the job James did, red catching under the line of her nail. “It looks good. You’re just a little rusty.”

James has spent the entire time thrilling under Stevie’s touch, breath frozen in her chest as her heart thunders away. Stevie’s fingers linger along her jawline – they slide up, of their own volition, nearly holding James’ cheek.

“Could I kiss you?” James’ voice is a thready whisper, torn apart by Stevie’s fingers, by the loving heat in her gaze.

Stevie can’t hold back the smile that splits her lips open into the stupid grin James loves. “I’d like that,” she says, and then she bites her bottom lip.

Remembering this, at least, comes easier than remembering how to apply lipstick: the step in, one arm around the waist, the other at the nape of the neck – the little lean up as Stevie meets her with her head tilted down. James’ fingers twist in the short hair at the back of Stevie’s head, and she smiles as their lips meet – though not as wide as Stevie does.

They don’t kiss at first so much as knock their teeth against each other; they’re both grinning like fools. James’ body should remember what to do but instead she hesitates and Stevie moves, capturing her lower lip and drawing it into a chaste kiss.

James gasps and then sighs and then forgets, for a moment, the present. She’s in a hundred places at once, Stevie’s mouth on hers; they’re in an alley in Brooklyn, the taste of blood on her tongue; it’s the dark before dawn and they’re by the door, she’s shipping out – she can taste salt but she isn’t sure whose tears they are or if it’s both; it’s probably both. there’s an angel above her body and she can’t place the love of her life with the larger, beautiful creature hanging over her – She mumbles her service number, Stevie quiets her with a kiss, and she knows; they’re about to jump a train and –

She remembers.

Oh, James remembers. She tosses both arms around Stevie’s neck and slides her tongue past those respectfully gentle lips, deepens the kiss into something frantic and desperate. Stevie lifts her up with those strong arms, and James squeaks into her mouth, then her ass meets the bathroom counter, something hits the floor, and she can lock her legs around Stevie’s waist and keep her forever.

Stevie’s the one to break the kiss off, panting deeply, and her lips are smeared with red. James laughs, laughs so hard that the tears that had been hiding in the corners of her eyes slide free. Stevie looks affronted, but only for a moment.

“What’s so funny?” She leans her forehead on James’ and licks her red lips.

James moves her hands from Stevie’s neck, lifting them both to cup her cheeks. “I love you.”

Until now, James had never noticed the rigidity of Stevie’s shoulders. She’d never considered the burdens she carried. And then Stevie sags – _sags_ – under the weight of her words. James catches her face against her neck, and has to reposition her arms again; around Stevie’s back, now, the metal and flesh side-by-side. She hadn’t even noticed she’d placed the prosthetic on Stevie’s face – she’d sworn to herself that she’d never taint her lover with it.

But she needs both of her hands to wrap around Stevie, to hold her and rub circles on her back as she sobs into James’ neck.

\---

When it started, there was fear; fear that she was wrong, that the memories didn’t belong to her, not the way she thought.

Then there was understanding: this was hers; she could have it and keep it and care for it, nurture it until more came and joined her.

Now there is creation.

There are new memories. Touch falls thick and fast; a few droplets become a storm, and she is unable to keep her hands from Stevie.

James learns the sensation of Stevie at her side. Her body clock reacts to her early morning jogs, and she sleepily nuzzles in a little closer, holding Stevie tight, begging for five more minutes. She learns the breadth of the bed and how it feels to bury her face in Stevie’s pillow, let the warmth of it satisfy until the real thing returns. James memorises the way Stevie’s face scrunches up when her sweaty face rubs against James’s, and she shoves the woman into the shower.

She appreciates perspective as she stands in front of one of Stevie’s canvases. Stevie paints around her, arms bracketing James in, keeping her safe as she watches another masterpiece unfold. For all that Stevie is heralded as the American dream (James won’t argue with that), she doesn’t know how to hang a picture, so they learn together. It doesn’t matter that the canvases are wonky, anyway.

James discovers that she can cook. Or she learns how to cook. It’s hard to equate what she does now, spending hours carefully finding recipes and ordering ingredients and constructing dishes, to how they used to live; putting hot dogs and potatoes into everything in the hope that it’d give them the calories to last until the next meal. She tests new seasoning and cooking methods – she makes ice cream and croissants and pasta from scratch. Stevie is a willing test subject. James learns what her face looks like when the food is bad but she doesn’t have the heart to say it.

She masters the contours of her lips. The colours of lipstick expand; the entire rainbow is laid out in their top bathroom drawer. James explores different formulas and finishes, uses lip=liners and glosses. The entire world of makeup sprawls before her, and it’s this reclamation that she enjoys the most. Her face becomes her own; she highlights and contours, carving the expression of a once-killer into something entirely of her own creation. There are eyeshadows and eyeliners and mascaras galore. She teaches herself the pressure needed to apply eyeliner with both hands, how to curl the tail upwards to make her eyes look larger. It becomes her artform. It gives her hands more to do. No more are they weapons: instead, they create, they give birth to new ideas.

She cooks and writes and paints her face, and it’s the quiet, soft life she always yearned for.

As much as things change, they stay fundamentally the same. Stevie still likes her best when she wears red lipstick. James likes to meet her eyes in the mirror as she maps it out, so intimately acquainted with the shape of her face now that she can do it nearly blindfolded.

She likes it more when Stevie kisses her silly – bats playfully at her chest, “you’re going to _smudge_ it, Stevie,” but she can’t get the words out without laughing.

Stevie looks her dead in the eye and draws a thumb over James’ bottom lip. The lipstick doesn’t move. She’s learned _that_ , too.

“I don’t think anything could smudge it,” Stevie remarks, some humour disappearing into awe. She smears her thumb over James’ lips again, only this time James catches it – draws the errant digit between her lips and sucks on it.

She is now a creator of pleasure, too.

James laves her tongue over Stevie’s thumb, watching as her eyes darken.

The thumb is removed – James likes to think reluctantly – but replaced almost instantly with Stevie’s mouth. She’s a sloppy kisser, and James can’t remember if she always was or if they have this shared sense that their separation is imminent so finesse Is low priority. Not that it’s a problem, because James has Stevie’s mouth on her, hands on her, _body_ on her, and that’s what matters the most.

Stevie lifts her up onto the counter, her go-to move which is the reason everything James owns is stored safely in the cupboards and drawers beneath the sink. She has the forethought to push the lipstick she’d just been using into the sink so it doesn’t meet the fate of so many before it, shattered on the ground when they’ve been otherwise preoccupied.

James locks Stevie in place with her ankles, hands stroking through her hair – it’s so long now, it’ll need a cut soon. James has been practising braiding her own hair, which all goes to waste when Stevie pulls the tie out and finger-brushes through the curls, still leaving wet kisses along one side of her jaw.

“Stevie,” James giggles as Stevie happens upon the ticklish spot beneath her ear; _happens upon_ , as if she doesn’t know exactly where it is. “Baby.”

“Yeah?” Stevie’s voice is already tighter than before, and she’s quickly unbuttoning down the front of James’ shirt dress.

Desperate fingers unclasp her bra, the caps sagging outwards enough for Stevie’s mouth to progress downwards: collarbone, the top of one breast, then over her nipple.

James’ head falls back and she moans, loudly, because she’s come to appreciate the sounds they can make now that they aren’t keeping a secret of themselves. She lets her body feel and respond, Stevie’s mouth a wicked thing, taking her apart with her tongue. James writhes against Stevie’s body, trying to get blessed friction.

Stevie chuckles around the nipple in her mouth, one of her hands reaching up to massage at the other. James could spend all day like this, Stevie turning her into one of her works of art – each stroke part of a greater vision, a masterpiece pulled together from nothingness.

Her hands, once they respond to her mind once more, lift up and under the tight t-shirt Stevie’s wearing. James suspects this is on purpose – she never wears a bra, where she can help it, and through the thin fabric her peaked nipples are clearly visible. James takes her time getting there, sighing as she feels those hard abs, cupping her breasts, just enough for a neat handful each.

They make out like the schoolgirls they’d once been – James remembers _that_ – hands all over each other, but above the belt.

“Take me to bed,” James aims for seductive – it comes out pleading.

Stevie obliges her anyway, both hands on James’ ass lifting her easily off the counter. James doesn’t make Stevie do all the work alone – she clings to her with her legs still locked around her waist.

She’s thankful for their small apartment as it takes Stevie mere seconds to deposit her on the bed, James’ brown, loosely curled hair fanning out across their linen.

“Look at you,” Stevie hums in satisfaction, spreading James’ dress open and sliding a hand over the front of her underwear.

“Look at _you_ ,” James replies, fisting a hand in Stevie’s hair and pulling her back in for another kiss. She bites at Stevie’s lip and inhales her laughter, tangles their tongues in an ongoing battle for dominance. No one wins – or maybe they both do.

James takes the opportunity to push her prosthetic hand beneath the waistband of Stevie’s sweats. When Stevie tries to break the kiss off, James’ flesh hand reels her back in by the hair, and Stevie relents. Though James had been uncertain the first – well, several times they did this – Stevie has made it abundantly clear that she will readily accept either hand on her body with positivity.

James takes that as an open invitation to massage Stevie through her panties with the metal hand, and she relinquishes her hold on Stevie just to hear her moan. She prefers to use her flesh hand – she likes to _feel_ it – but there’s something about the unyielding material that makes it perfect for rubbing yourself against. Kind of like the way Stevie’s pressing her knee up between James’ legs, and she’s rolling her hips down ono it.

The sun’s setting through the window, bathing Stevie in its light. She looks ethereal there, hovering above James, eyes fluttered closed and mouth hanging open. James takes a moment to appreciate this – _her_ – as she strokes the back of her flash hand down Stevie’s cheek.

Stevie smiles and forces her eyes open, blinking back down at James.

“I love _you_ , James,” she says, immeasurably soft – in direct contrast to the frantic heat that’d been there a moment before.

“I love you, too,” James answers unthinkingly. There’s no need for thought – first, she remembered this, their love an all-consuming fire. And every day she gets to create more of it – she fans the flames and builds them higher, so that nothing can put it out.


End file.
